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As we covered in an earlier article, the importance of SEO of the title of your web pages shouldn’t be underestimated – and nor should it be overlooked for the content of your web pages either. However, it’s also really important to maintain the quality of your copywriting as well as optimising the content for searches. No-one enjoys reading an article that doesn’t flow smoothly and has clearly been written for a robot. There is also suggestion that Google prefers natural content anyway, rather than content that has obviously been search engine optimised.

One element of good copywriting is keyword density. It is a common mistake to think that cramming as many keywords into your content as possible will improve your favour with Google – not only is this not entirely true, as you can imagine it doesn’t make for a scintillating read either! Yes, it is still important to use relevant keywords in your copy but the best way to do this is to do it naturally. Generally, it is inevitable that when writing naturally about a topic you will use relevant keywords anyway so don’t overdo it.

An alternative to overusing one or two of the same keywords is to think about synonyms and related keywords. Again, don’t overdo it and natural writing will most likely incorporate them anyway but it is something to bear in mind. Search engines use something called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to bring up search results matching the intentions of the person searching. By using synonyms, your copy might have a more natural flow and attract more readers whilst keeping its appeal to Google at the same time.

Another important aspect of good copywriting we haven’t mentioned thus far is your meta-description. This is what prospective readers of your web page will read immediately after your title. Again, as with the main body of copy, get your keywords in here but as naturally as possible. This meta-description combined with your title tags is among the first things Google uses to categorise your individual web page.

Finally, social media is your strongest tool to publicise you web page. Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others like them all provide opportunities for shares, links and more traffic. More on social media management next time!

With the hundreds and thousands of articles on the Internet offering up advice on what the most important aspect of good copywriting is, you couldn’t be blamed for being just a bit overwhelmed by it all. One thing is for certain – the importance of good copywriting and SEO (search engine optimisation) for your business’ website cannot be underestimated and it does begin before you write the first word of page content.

The title is obviously the first thing your readers will see of your webpage and is possibly the most powerful on-site search engine ranking factor that you have control over. Relevance is absolutely key; a title is meant to be an accurate and concise description of the webpage’s content. The more key words that can be incorporated into the title, the better your ranking will be in search engines.

Having said this, there are a couple of important things to remember when saturating your title with key words! Firstly, keep the title to within 70 characters or the search engine will cut your title short, replacing the second part of your title with an ellipsis and the impact on the reader will be lost. Secondly, try and keep the most important key words toward the start of your title even if this means your business’ name has to be pushed towards the end of the title or be taken out completely. This will help on the click through rate of readers from search engine results pages.

With all this talk of SEO of your webpage title it might be easy to forget the importance of the quality of the content of your title and the overall user experience. There is little point in having optimised your title for search engines if all your potential readers are scrolling right on past your webpage to click on the page below yours with a more interesting and hard hitting title. Not only will your title be displayed in search engine results, but also at the top of the browser once a reader has opened your webpage and in addition, on external websites (like social networking sites) as link anchor text. This makes it even more important to combine good SEO and consideration of the user experience in your title.

Once your webpage title has been search engine optimised and is written in a way that sparks initial interest, you have your reader right where you want them – on your webpage. Now the test is in your copywriting. It only takes a matter of seconds for a reader to decide to go back to their search results and find a different page for their needs so this part is equally as vital as your title. Come back and read next week’s blog for tips on this next stage of good copywriting for your business.

Meanwhile, if you feel you want to take the hassle out of blogging for your business or need additional guidance on SEO or other aspects of good copywriting, have a look at our other services here.

Blogs are multifarious tools – they can market your product, build your brand and drive customer engagement. Ultimately, they can be a source of revenue.

Budgets are changing. The content marketing institute reports that 86% of B2C companies are planning to keep or increase their content marketing spend in 2013. 54% of B2B companies are planning to increase their content marketing. These figures demonstrate the increasing importance of content marketing, of supplying, through various channels, relevant, informative content to your customers. Done right, loyalty and increased business are the reward. There are, however, many, many ways to go wrong with the launch of a blog. There are questions to ask before you even start messing around with themes in wordpress.

Are we really committed to funding a content marketing strategy?

Is management really onboard?

Blogging can cost more than you think. Designing an attractive blog with a good interface requires, well, good designers. And you’ll likely have needs which aren’t met by the current suite of plugins – which, again, may lead to consultancy costs. Hosting your blog, hiring writers to produce regular content or for a specific project, email marketing services, A/B testing your call to actions – the costs quickly add up.

You can become a prisoner to your own success, as your blog starts to generate a deluge of customer feedback, whether through email or comments. The time you had for posting, you know actually producing content, begins to shrink. You start asking yourself whether sleep is really that important, or whether it might be prudent to hire additional staff.

Budgeting for known and potential expenses is vital.

Ask yourself why: Why start a blog? Why get into content marketing and social media?

Is it because everyone else is doing it? Is it because it might increase sales? Don’t let your answers to these questions be this vague. Establish what content marketing means for your brand – is it videos, is it blog posts, is it email marketing? And what exactly do you want to communicate about your brand, in addition to information about your product and services? Likely it’s passion, authority and expertise. How have the best done it – analyse the offerings of leaders in your field to see just how they achieved their results (intimation is both flattery and necessity).

Brainstorm! You want plenty of content ready to go on launch day – at least 10-15 brilliantly written blog posts and plenty of ideas in reserve. Thinking up new content is a challenge but one that is made easier when your writers have the results of brainstorming sessions to call upon.

Launching a blog is an exciting moment for a business. Blogging can be a fun activity – millions do it – but it’s also a great business tool. Knowing your goals, your brand and best blogging practice, and taking the time get everyone on the same page will make the launch of your blog as headache free as possible

Have you launched a blog? Are you long on ideas but short on content? Find out more about our services here.

Great content produced on a consistent basis is definitely at the core of a successful blog. But many writers and blogs ignore strategies which would massively increase their traffic, in the naïve hope that content is the only requirement for success.

One strategy which has remained popular for some time is that of guest blogging. Guest blogging is simply pitching and writing articles for blogs relevant to your niche or market.

Working for my competitors?

At first glance guest blogging might seem like producing content for your competition. And it can be. Yet, it’s still an excellent strategy for many reasons. Here’s just a sample of those reasons.

Authority

Of course you will need to maintain the same high standards of content in your guest posting as in your own postings – the more popular sites within a niche can afford to be very picky as they will be inundated with pitches.

But if you do manage to get something posted, you have the opportunity to engage a new audience with your brand. Two crucial points of engagement are the author bio and the comment field.

Responding to comments is just good practice. Popular blogs will have large and responsive communities. Don’t ignore their questions and comments – they represent another opportunity, in addition to the guest post itself, to communicate your authority on the subject.

The author bio is where you lay out who you are what you do. It’s brief window where you can communicate your brand – and of course link to your own blog. If you write great stuff, people will naturally want to know who you are.

Building relationships

So you’ve reached out to another audience – but done right guest posting can also develop new relationships. If you pitch and write great content for a blog, they may return the favour by writing for your blog. And when it comes time to release a new product or service, this relationship may be a source of free marketing. Perhaps you can invite them to review the product – if the product is good, you get a great review and exposure to the readership of a popular blog. The writer of the review can directly link to the product or service through an affiliate marketing scheme – making this a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Those precious backlinks

The competition for ranking will always be fierce. It’s such a huge advantage to appear on the first page of results (68% of users will find what they are looking for on this page). Linking to your website or blog from the author bio of your guest post will increase your ranking. Google gives weight to backlinks, particularly from reputable or popular sites. But it’s also important to link from the right part of your bio. Presumably, you are already trying to rank for a particular keyword or group of keywords (if not, why not?). Make sure to include and backlink this keyword on the author bio you submit for your guest post.

Expect change

Guest posting is a popular and fairly well established technique; but because of this its popularity will, over time, reduce in effectiveness. Content marketing is a constantly evolving world – its vital to adopt new techniques when they come around (and to know which ones are useful and which are duds) because they have the most power when they have yet to be adopted by man and his dog.

Dizzying volumes of content are published on the internet every second of the day. Without content curation we would be lost in this media mass. Search engines are, of course, content curators, their constantly developing algorithms assign relevancy and importance to everything that is published on the web. Google has risen to pre-eminence in this sector. They are the authority; their results the most trusted, the most seen and therefore the most relevant for those doing business over the internet.

For a new brand seeking to develop authority in a particular niche, the spectre of established leaders can seem overwhelming, their stranglehold on the top search engine page results unshakeable. Establishing authority requires a multi-pronged approach. Clearly, a great product is the starting point. Next comes content which sells, establishes the identity of your brand and fosters a sense of community. Producing and sharing your own content whether through blog posts, press releases or infographics is a vital part of an effective internet marketing strategy; it demonstrates your authority, distinguishes your brand and communicates passion.

But sharing the content of influential figures in your niche or market can also be a way of establishing yourself as a trusted source. This can be as simple as a retweet or posting a youtube video to your business’s facebook page. The mass of information available on the internet compels us to seek out content curators; adopting this role across your social media hubs is a great way of increasing engagement with your brand.

Sourcing content

Some legwork is required to find the best sources. Alltop and technorati are directories which rank blogs based on authority. You can view the top blogs within a particular niche – education or books, for example.

There are aggregation sites in many markets – inbound.org, for example, aggregates content in the marketing and technology field.

Then there are the various social media hubs – sites like reddit, twitter and youtube which can be searched according to subject area and popularity/view count: a great way of finding content which is performing very well in your niche.

The right tools make all the difference

Without the right tools searching through these sources would be an unprofitable time-sink. Google reader was the favoured tool of many – it’s free and easy to use – but it’s demise has been dated by google for the 1st of July. If this is your favoured RSS feed aggregator, you are probably already hunting around for an adequate replacement. Feedly, netvibes and newsblur are all candidates worth a look.

These tools will gather the headlines from your top sources, allowing you to better and quicker assess what is of interest and what might make a worthwhile share.

Share with personality

Add the personality of your brand to your shares, i.e. introduce it with a short summary – explain why it is relevant, funny, interesting etc. You always want your own voice to be in the mix.

And share a diverse range of material from serious, intellectual stuff to more light-hearted fare .

An inclusive content marketing strategy

Clearly, your first priority should be generating your own content. But sharing the content of influential leaders in your niche, or just stuff that will be relevant or entertaining to your target audience is a great way to establish your business as a trusted source of information, which entices customers or clients to engage with your brand again and again.

Google+ is an intelligent social media platform in which good SEO practice can be enhanced and refined. It has a wide variety of features tailor made for posting and sharing quality content, with easy to use interfaces which can enhance your SEO. For starters, the concept of Google+ ‘Circles’ allow users to organise each aspect of their online life, from family and friends, co-workers and also interests. These circles can be created by you, and Google+ allows you to filter them, personalising what streams appear on your homepage when you visit Google+. Obviously this is a great way of refining search results even more. If your website is linked with Google+ there is also the option of using direct connect, which allows people to add your site to their circles directly from search results.

Google+ also has an interesting application called Explore, a simple way of bringing trending topics directly to you from outside the site. You’re able to filter these trending topics by category, making it easier to find exactly what you need. By using the best SEO practices it’s easier for people to find you from within Google+.

Another great feature of Google+ is the +1 button that can be put on each page of your content. With this feature, other people can ‘+1’ it. Google is able to track these clicks and use each +1 as a ranking signal. These ranking signals are integrated into their real-time search results, making it even simpler to enable your content to appear higher in the rankings. As these ‘+1’s are clicked by real people, it’s also a good indicator of the quality of your content. When people endorse you through the +1 button it helps Google to trust that your content is of a good standard. The importance and effectiveness of the +1 button cannot be stressed enough, as it is an incredibly powerful tool which has the ability of really boosting your page rankings.

Finally, Google+ has a robust blogging interface where you can keep people updated with your content, embedding as many links to your site as needed within each post. Facebook and Twitter are no doubt important and useful for this, but nowhere near as effective as Google+ when it comes to search results, as Facebook and Twitter restrict Google from accessing a lot of their data. When writing these blogs, the first sentence becomes part of the title tag, so good SEO practice by using the right keywords helps rankings even more. These blogs can be shared in your circles and spread around Google+. Sharing is important and enables your content to be seen by a wider audience.

Your Google+ account is linked with your Gmail account, so chances are you may have one already. It’s a wonderfully simple tool to help you with SEO, so go check it out and discover for yourself, you won’t regret it!

Like so many web-based trends, the word ‘blog’ has passed from novelty to ubiquity. Even though their use by people to keep friends updated on their lives has mostly been superseded by people instead keeping one or several profiles on one of the big social media sites, blogs still make up a huge part of activity on the web. Whether you come across them following a Google search for virtually any subject under the sun or they are used by journalists or activists to break big news scoops, blogs are now just as much a feature of online life as email and regular websites.

Strangely, though, many businesses haven’t caught onto this fact. Although nowadays you’ll struggle to find a business that doesn’t have some sort of web presence—even most small businesses have a website of some description, or at least a listing in an online business directory of some sort—many of them don’t keep a blog.

Well, why should they, you might ask. Aren’t blogs just for disseminating news or for providing a stream of new information? And isn’t it just enough for my business to keep its website updated?

The answer to all these questions, as any copywriting professional or SEO copywriting expert will tell you, is a resounding no. Smart businesses know that keeping a blog is one of the best strategies out there for reaching your target market.

There are a couple of reasons for this, which all go beyond what a blog is superficially understood to be by many. Firstly, although blog posts are linked to the date when they are published, they shouldn’t be thought of as some sort of online equivalent of a newspaper article that’s read one day and forgotten the next.

Rather, they’re a source of information that people regularly refer back to. And more often than not, your customers will be interested in the world that surrounds the products or services you offer, rather than simply purchasing from you and that being the end of the matter.

Businesses that operate blogs that inform and enlighten with regard to their field of activity therefore get many, many more visitors than standalone websites. So long as they deploy skillful copywriting that brings to life the products and services they offer (to give an example, a site selling fashion accessories running a blog on upcoming trends in handbags or reports from fashion shows),both potential customers who come across the blog in the course of a Google search and regular readers of the blog alike will continually be passing by your site.

The all-important Google search itself is another reason to consider hiring the services of a professional SEO copywriting outfit to run a blog. One of the fundamental rules of online commerce is the higher in the search engine rankings you are, the more customers you’ll get. A blog is one of the most important ways to climb up those rankings.

This is largely due to the technicalities of how search engine results are calculated, the complexities of which our SEO copywriting experts would be more than happy to talk you through. But in a nutshell, the more the keywords that people use to search for the product you offer appear on your site, the higher it’ll appear in the search engines. (Identifying these keywords is another thing our SEO copywriting experts can help you with.)

Now, if your site has little in the way of text it’ll struggle to get a high position. But if it has an extensive blog in which these terms are regularly used within its articles, it’ll sail up to the first page of results in no time.

In our next blog post we’ll cover some of the most popular copywriting ideas for great blog-post content. But if in the meantime you’d like to learn more about how our copywriting services and SEO expertise can help you, then we’d be delighted if you got in touch with us.

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As we covered in an earlier article, the importance of SEO of the title of your web pages shouldn’t be underestimated – and nor should it be overlooked for the content of your web pages either. However, it’s also really important to maintain the quality of your copywriting as well as optimising the content for [...]